Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, May 25th at 11:00 for Visiting Journalist Tracie McMillan’s talk, “The White Bonus: What Racism Gets Us In America.”
McMillan is an independent investigative journalist. Her The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s Farm Fields and the Dinner Table (Scribner, 2012) was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the James Beard Journalism award and winner of both the Sidney Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and Books for a Better Life Award. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Mother Jones, The New York Times and on National Public Radio. McMillan holds a BA from New York University. She was a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan (2012-13) and a Senior Fellow in Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University (2011-19).
While at the foundation, she is researching and writing The White Bonus, a work of investigative memoir and narrative journalism that uses social science to quantify the cash value of whiteness to be published by Henry Holt, Inc. Alternating between narratives of three generations of her white, working class family and single-chapter profiles of five other white Americans, her project links individual genealogies of wealth and opportunity to history, social science, and public policy. The book engages directly with research on social policy, as well as on social issues like mass incarceration, housing and educational segregation, public health, and labor; it documents how these policies affect the racial wealth gap, social mobility, public health disparities, and economic inequality.
Samples of her work are available below: